TEACHING YOUTH STUDIES THROUGH POPULAR CULTURE +
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SARAH BAKER AND BRADY ROBARDS
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION POPULAR CULTURE AND THE YOUTH STUDIES CLASSROOM
T
his resource for teachers of youth studies and related disciplines offers an overview of the ways in which popular culture can be incorporated into the classroom. It provides a synthesis of previous writing on approaches to the use of popular culture in teaching and includes case studies illustrating how popular culture has worked in the authors’ own youth studies classrooms. Through the provision of practical and inventive examples, the book aims to support youth studies instructors who are in the process of designing new courses, teaching youth studies for the first time or seeking to introduce innovative practices into established courses. It is not meant as a definitive guide to the adoption of popular culture in youth studies pedagogy, but rather as a starting point, offering ideas that can then be adopted and built upon, or from which new innovations may arise. Our core concern is to demonstrate the many ways in which popular culture can be used as a pedagogical tool to enhance student engagement and assist in students’ understanding of course content. In our own practice as convenors, lecturers and tutors in the sociology major at Australia’s Griffith University (and more recently for Brady, at the University of Tasmania) we have designed courses (also called units or subjects, depending on the university’s preferred nomenclature) and developed content for introductory and more advanced undergraduate students in which popular culture is used to scaffold or support the learning experience. The book draws upon our experiences as sociologists of youth and, more specifically, on our disciplinary knowledges in cultural studies, popular music studies and internet/new media scholarship. A book such as this is, of course, open to the criticism that in pressing the case that popular culture can provide a foundation for learning, we are promoting the dumbing down of higher education. Such criticisms rest on an assumption that anything less than the conventional or traditional approach to university teaching means the abandonment of core values of university learning, with subsequent erosion of standards, a stance
1
POPULAR CULTURE AND THE YOUTH STUDIES CLASSROOM
exemplified in Frank Furedi’s take on the disappearance of intellectuals and the rise of philistinism.1 This polarisation of pedagogical approaches is, as Brad West, Jason Pudsey and Priscilla Dunk-West point out, part of the larger ‘culture wars’ that have come to divide contemporary society.2 But accusations of dumbing down, in our opinion, too often fail to take into account the varied contexts in which much tertiary-level teaching now occurs and tend to idealise a traditional approach to university education that is also not without its problems. In order to address growing problems around student retention, the global expansion of higher education has lead to increased pressures on teachers to make their coursework more accessible and more applicable to the everyday life of students. The changing higher education context means that what constitutes effective teaching continues to evolve. As Marcia Devlin and Gayani Samarawickrema explain, … the massification and the internationalisation of Australian higher education have meant that student diversity has increased and therefore effective teaching must be able to manage and address such diversity. In order to engage all students, teachers must have an appropriate pedagogical response that accommodates a wider range of both learning styles and preferences and a wider range of language, cultural and educational backgrounds than has previously been the case (Devlin 2007c; Higgins, Hartley & Skelton 2002; Skelton 2002) … As the Australian higher education population further diversifies … the collective understanding of effective teaching will need to evolve to incorporate such shifts.3
Universities are now targeting non-traditional students for recruitment, including students who will be the first in their families to undertake tertiary study, students from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds and students with traditionally low levels of representation in higher education, such as indigenous populations, students with disabilities and students from regional areas who undertake their studies by distance education. In this book we seek to address the evolving needs and expectations of these non-traditional students of youth studies and to aid effective teaching by providing both an informed framework and a set of case studies for the incorporation of popular culture into the classroom. We emphasise that ours is not a celebratory approach to the use of popular culture, nor is it one that sees television, music or social media as fix-alls for the challenges of teaching in the massified higher education environment.
2
INTRODUCTION
Rather, our call is for a use of popular culture that is grounded in theoretical approaches to university teaching and which supports rather than replaces traditional pedagogies and forms of learning.4 We are, then, arguing for the critical incorporation of popular culture in the youth studies classroom, with popular culture acting as a means to scaffold students’ understandings of the subject matter by drawing on material that is part of their everyday cultural landscape. For the study of youth in society to be effective, it must take in and be critical of the representations of our society that constitute popular culture. Because popular culture of all forms looms large in the lives of young people, youth studies as a discipline has an obligation to attend to and incorporate the study of popular culture. According to David Chaney, this obligation has largely been met by the cultural turn of the 1970s;5 yet, due to popular culture being too often associated with the dumbing down of public life, there continues to be a hesitancy to incorporate a focus on popular culture into many youth studies classrooms. Our suggestion is that the use of popular culture is imperative in enabling students to take disciplinary knowledge into their everyday lives, whether for introducing biographical perspectives on youth, discussing the finer points of late-modern theory, or outlining Durkheim’s research on suicide. Embedding popular culture into youth studies courses adds another dimension to students’ engagement with popular culture, encouraging them to unpack representations of young people and youth issues in the popular culture forms they consume and to (re-)consider cultural, social, political and academic debates through an analysis of an otherwise taken-for-granted aspect of their life-worlds. The core rationale of this book therefore can be understood, first, as a response to the expansion of higher education that has lead to a much more diverse student population with differing demands, expectations and levels of cultural capital, and second, as an illustration of how standard pedagogical approaches to the teaching of youth studies can be adapted to the ongoing changes in higher education and revised to remain current and applicable while still being rigorous and theoretically informed.
TEACHING THE SOCIOLOGY OF YOUTH Courses with a focus on the lives of young people feature in most Australian universities and cover a range of topics. For example, in this book we draw on our experiences in classrooms from 2008 to 2013 teaching at Griffith
3
POPULAR CULTURE AND THE YOUTH STUDIES CLASSROOM
University in the first-year-level introductory course Youth and Society, and the third-year-level advanced course Youth Culture and Subculture. Most recently, Brady has also coordinated a second/third-year-level unit, Sociology of Youth, at the University of Tasmania. Other youth-related courses at Griffith University include those with specialisations in crime and justice, mental health and the media. Other universities have courses with a focus on, for example, risk, gender, sexuality, sexual health, education and employment and social movements. The uses of popular culture we describe in this book can be adapted for all types of content that might be found in such courses. Because our own teaching has been within a sociology major in the Bachelor of Arts, the main emphasis in this book is on the sociology of youth rather than on approaches to youth studies that emerge from other disciplines like education, social work or psychology. However, the curriculum innovations we put forward can be applied beyond sociology, and we believe instructors from across youth studies will find the research, suggested activities and approaches contained here useful in engaging students’ learning. Again, because our teaching of youth studies is grounded in sociology, C. Wright Mills’s concept of the ‘sociological imagination’ is central to our pedagogical approach. For Mills, the sociological imagination ‘enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene … to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions’.6 This allows students to notice the norms and social conventions that govern social spaces (grocery stores, cinemas, pubs and clubs, classrooms) and to re-think everyday life.7 The sociological imagination also gives students the necessary tools to deconstruct the culture they consume on a daily basis, which is the process at the core of this book. Our students frequently report that after even one semester in a youth studies course, the way they see their world changes drastically. In television shows they notice how gender is performed and how gender expectations are reinforced; they notice how advertising is targeted through processes of class distinction; and in films, they notice how characters operate according to assumptions about race and ethnicity. Popular culture here serves as a complex system of symbols in which lived realities of students, who are often young people themselves, are reflected back at them. Throughout the book, we suggest that the sociological imagination allows these students to critically deconstruct the forms of popular culture they consume and produce on a daily basis.
4
INTRODUCTION
An obvious and frequently unasked question is: What is youth? In our work we draw on Mary Jane Kehily’s framing of youth, to incorporate an open-ended approach with multiple conceptual frames: Definitions of ‘youth’ in Western societies usually refer to the life stage between childhood and adulthood, the transitional period between being dependent and becoming independent. As Simon Frith (2005) points out, youth is a sociological category rather than a biological one. As such it is a more flexible concept than ‘adolescent’ or ‘teenager’. Frith suggests that at the end of the twentieth century the notion of youth could describe a young person, an attitude and an established social institution. In contemporary times the transition from childhood to adulthood is increasingly protracted, commonly lasting much longer than adolescence or the ‘growing up’ years … There is evidence that transitions from youth to adulthood are now substantially different from those experienced by previous generations, and also that they are increasingly unequal.8
While instructors from certain disciplines concerned with youth, such as education, psychology or criminology, may wish to take a more categorical approach to youth and draw age parameters around youth, that is not the approach taken here. We approach youth, as Frith and Kehily suggest above, as a sociological construct that operates at multiple levels: the individual young person, an attitude for being in the social world, and an institution.
A TEACHING PHILOSOPHY FOR YOUTH STUDIES In our five years teaching together in the sociology major at Griffith University, we developed a teaching philosophy that underpins the practices we highlight in this book. Our use of popular culture in the youth studies classroom is part of this broader pedagogical approach, and it is important that we say something about this philosophy in order to provide the context for what follows. Our philosophy is student-centred, involving a transformative pedagogy in which learning is holistic, that is concerning the student as a whole person. It emphasises the development of supportive, collaborative classroom environments in which ‘student-centred’ means an emphasis on ‘co-operative learning’ between students and between student(s) and teacher(s) as an effective way to build student capacities and enhance engagement.9 A collaborative approach that emphasises the student–teacher relationship is essential because learning and teaching are constituted, in a
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POPULAR CULTURE AND THE YOUTH STUDIES CLASSROOM
phenomenographic sense, ‘in the relationship between the knower and the context’, with teachers ‘constitut[ing] knowledge’ and then ‘bringing students into a relationship with that knowledge’.10 Teaching for learning in youth studies classrooms is, then, about collaboration, with students understood as being both active and independent learners with important contributions to make to the classroom. The key to such a collaborative approach is an emphasis on learning by doing collectively. Guided by the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger on ‘situated learning’ and ‘communities of practice’, this approach fosters students’ sense of self-esteem and interdependence by creating a learning situation where authority is shared.11 As John Biggs notes, when students feel ‘ownership of their learning’, their motivation for learning increases.12 Such an approach is particularly important to the teaching of youth studies as it has long been recognised, especially following the expansion of higher education, that many students struggle to grasp sociology’s theoretical and methodological concerns and approaches, and that if key concepts and theories aren’t adequately scaffolded – such as with modelling, guided learning or interactive supports – students don’t persist with the discipline.13 The increasing emphasis on student retention demands the creation of learning environments that enable students to navigate difficult theoretical terrain in a way that also creates a sense of belonging among a diverse cohort. Our approach is also informed by the work of Parker Palmer regarding the centrality of a teacher’s ‘identity and integrity’ to good teaching.14 Fostering the collaborative learning environment depends on our teaching from the position of the ‘undivided self’ – that is, drawing on aspects of our identity that have relevance for particular topics, courses or student cohorts.15 In the words of one student, the result is a ‘hands-on approach’, which results in a higher degree of ‘interaction with students’.16 This promotes a productive learning–teaching relationship that benefits students and teacher, with – as one of our students said – the teacher’s passion for youth studies rubbing off on everyone else in the classroom.17 According to Carolin Kreber, ‘excellent teachers’ are ‘those who know how to motivate their students, how to convey concepts, and how to help students overcome difficulty in their learning’.18 The idea of passion is important because students’ motivation is intimately intertwined with their teacher’s motivation and therefore provides the framework for successful collaboration. The use of popular culture in our classrooms helps foster motivation and provides a vehicle through which learning occurs. As our first-year Youth and Society students’ feedback
6
INTRODUCTION
explains, the use of popular culture in the youth studies classroom helps them understand course content, and, in their opinion, using visual media as a representation form to engage the students ‘works tremendously’.19 As well as being student-centred, our approach is also research-led, which links very much to Palmer’s emphasis on the identity of the teacher. The foundation of our curriculum design and innovations is our expertise in qualitative approaches to youth studies research. We aim to motivate students through demonstrating, in the classroom and in curriculum design, our passionate interest in the discipline and, linked to this, our research experience. Sarah uses snapshots from ethnographic fieldwork she has undertaken with pre-teen girls, marginalised young people and entry-level workers in the cultural industries in Australia, Europe and North America, to illustrate issues, concepts and theories covered in our courses and to provide students with a sense of the kinds of research opportunities available for youth studies researchers. When teaching ‘cultures of violence’ in Youth and Society, for example, Sarah draws on her experiences conducting fieldwork in juvenile detention facilities.20 Similarly, in the course Youth Culture and Subculture, Brady unpacks the theoretical position of post-subculture21 by bringing in his empirical research on young people’s use of social network sites, like MySpace and Facebook, to construct a reflexive sense of identity and belonging. But ‘research-led’ does not only mean weaving our research experiences into our teaching. It is also concerned with the ways in which we foster increased student participation in learning through effective modelling of a ‘career sociologist’ or ‘youth studies researcher/practitioner’, with students then being inspired to develop their own ‘personal career’22 in youth studies. The focus on research helps instil a disciplinary ‘sense of purpose’23 around the future applicability of students’ emerging sociological imaginations in the field of youth studies. A research-led approach also underpins our curriculum design, which works to support independent knowledge production at all undergraduate levels. The research experience frames our approach to teaching youth studies, as is evidenced in Chapters 7 and 9. Popular culture is therefore only one aspect of our pedagogical approach and is used as a tool to bring these elements together. Rather than dumbing down education, ours is a ‘pedagogy of substance’,24 which involves creating optimal learning environments that provide opportunities for ‘connectedness’ between student–teacher–subject25 and a critical collaborative space for supported, independent knowledge production.
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POPULAR CULTURE AND THE YOUTH STUDIES CLASSROOM
In this space, student engagement and achievement is further fostered by way of the teacher animating and aligning complex theory and concepts with student experience and interests – popular culture being central to this final point.
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK Chapters 2 through 6 form Part 1, which introduces youth studies teachers to the various ways in which popular culture can be incorporated into the teaching of a diverse range of youth-related topics. The chapters break down popular culture into its various forms, providing examples of how different forms can assist students in developing their understanding of the social worlds of young people. Chapters 7 through 10 make up Part 2 in which we further illustrate the integration of popular culture into the youth studies classroom by providing case studies drawn from the authors’ own teaching with popular culture. This theory and practice structure provides a useful resource for instructors wishing to expand their use of popular culture as a pedagogical tool in the youth studies classroom. Each chapter in Part 1 begins with an overview of teaching scholarship, focusing on the use of the popular culture form under consideration and followed by examples of how we have used the form in our own classrooms. A resources table is also provided with suggestions of additional songs, television shows, films and other media that could be incorporated when teaching a variety of youth studies topics. Finally, each chapter outlines assignments that can be set to maximise the pedagogical benefits of that popular culture form. Chapters 2 and 3 consider screen media with a focus on film and ‘the small screen’, respectively. The chapter on film begins with a consideration of the literature around the use of film in higher education classrooms. We build our argument that film can be used as a way to identify and critique how young people are represented in popular culture and then discuss three films in more detail – Newcastle, Step Brothers and the documentary There is no 3G in Heaven – providing examples of how these films might be used in the classroom or assigned as part of an additional exercise. In Chapter 3, we combine a discussion of television, the traditional small screen, with the other increasingly dominant small screens in our lives – computer screens, smartphones and tablets. Given that so much television is now downloaded and consumed through computers, this convergence is difficult to avoid.
8
INTRODUCTION
We also briefly consider the role video games, as forms of popular culture traditionally understood to be dominated by young people, might play in the youth studies classroom, as both mechanisms for engaging students and also as objects or texts to be understood and analysed. Chapter 4 considers the use of popular music in the classroom, with a focus on the role of voice as a mechanism of power in music. Various forms of popular music are closely tied to youth, and genres of music often form critical backbones in youth cultures. As we argue, making use of popular music in the classroom can also work to humanise instructors and improve engagement, allowing students to forge a stronger sense of connection to their teachers. Chapter 5 explores how novels, poems, comic books and ‘zines’ can be integrated into the youth studies classroom, and how a creative writing task might be used as an innovative assessment item. To illustrate this, the chapter includes a poem that emerged from a student’s research project in the third-year course Youth Culture and Subculture. Chapter 6, the final chapter in Part 1 of the book, is concerned with print media and advertising. Here we discuss the surf magazine Tracks, exploring two different analytical readings of the magazine that both attend to the way the magazine works to socialise its young readers into understandings of gender. Although each reading of the magazine focuses on similar areas, the authors come to different conclusions. We structure an in-class activity around these readings that encourages students to develop their own analytical position. We then look at how the ‘race riots’ in Burleigh on Queensland’s Gold Coast were represented in the local newspaper and encourage students to take their own critical approach to interpreting representations of young people and conflict in local print media. In the section on advertising, we scaffold another in-class exercise that deconstructs KFC’s ‘Say it with chicken’ advertising campaign, drawing on an Australian Advertising Standards Bureau complaint report to consider how media standards are policed and managed. Moving from the overview of popular cultural forms in Part 1, the case studies in Part 2 highlight in more detail how popular culture has informed the teaching practices of the book’s authors. The case study examples provide a more concrete understanding of how popular culture can become central to the learning and teaching process and how students perceive the use of popular culture in the youth studies classroom. In these chapters we
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POPULAR CULTURE AND THE YOUTH STUDIES CLASSROOM
draw specifically on our work in the two Griffith University courses, Youth and Society, and Youth Culture and Subculture. Chapter 7 looks at the use of digital technologies in the Youth and Society course. Based on their own experiences, students in the course create digital narratives about youth transition and then upload these short videos to YouTube. The digital narratives are contextualised by a late-modern theoretical framework that looks at aspects of risk and individualisation. The chapter explores how digital narratives can assist students’ understanding of youth studies through an analysis of their own experiences. Continuing with the focus on our teaching of Youth and Society, Chapter 8 outlines our innovative method of incorporating popular music into higher education teaching. Karaoke is deployed by the authors in the first lecture of the course with the two-fold purpose of introducing students to the central themes through an analysis of song lyrics and acting as an icebreaker by becoming a talking point for students. The chapter sets out the purpose of the karaoke exercise in relation to the digital narrative assignment that was the focus of Chapter 7, and then looks at how it was deployed in the classroom and student responses. Our focus on introductory youth studies classes moves to more advanced undergraduate study in Chapter 9, which focuses on the ways in which film can be used to introduce students to ethnographic methodology. In teaching observation skills, the chapter looks at the use of films depicting subcultures and how associated assessment can then introduce students to ways of writing ethnography. Our final case study considers the role of social media in youth studies education. Chapter 10 argues that proponents of incorporating the usage of sites like Facebook and Twitter into classrooms often fail to consider the ways in which students perceive the online space as personal, and institutional involvement as problematic and even invasive. However, offering social media as an optional way in which students can connect with each other and with instructors can be beneficial. Finally, a brief Conclusion encourages teachers to further innovate in the teaching of youth studies by developing new, pedagogically informed uses of popular culture in the youth studies classroom. 
10
INTRODUCTION
NOTES 1. Frank Furedi, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistinism (London: Continuum Books, 2004). 2. Brad West, Jason Pudsey and Priscilla Dunk-West, “Pedagogy Beyond the Culture Wars: De-differentiation and the Use of Technology and Popular Culture in Undergraduate Sociology Teaching,” Journal of Sociology 47, no. 2 (2011), 200. 3. Marcia Devlin and Gayani Samarawickrema, “The Criteria of Effective Teaching in a Changing Higher Education Context,” Higher Education Research & Development 29, no. 2 (2010), 111-124. 4. West, Pudsey and Dunk-West. 5. David Chaney, The Cultural Turn: Scene-Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1994). 6. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 5. 7. Andy Bennett, Culture and Everyday Life (London: Sage, 2005). 8. Mary Jane Kehily, “Youth: A Cultural Perspective,” Understanding Youth: Perspectives, Identities and Practices, ed. Mary Jane Kehily (London: Sage/ The Open University, 2007), 3. 9. Peter Kugel, “How Professors Develop as Teachers,” Studies in Higher Education 18, no. 3 (1993), 323. 10. Elaine Martin, Michael Prosser, Keith Trigwell, Paul Ramsden and Joan Benjamin, “What University Teachers Teach and How They Teach It,” Teacher Thinking, Beliefs and Knowledge in Higher Education, eds. Nira Hativa and Peter Goodyear (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 104. 11. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 12. John Biggs, Teaching for Quality Learning at University (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003), 64. 13. Peter Beilharz, “Teaching Sociological Theory,” Nexus 16, no. 2 (2004), 5. 14. Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1998), 10. 15. Ibid., 15. 16. Student feedback for the course Youth Culture and Subculture, 2010. 17. Ibid. 18. Carolin Kreber, “Teaching Excellence, Teaching Expertise, and the Scholarship of Teaching,” Innovative Higher Education 27, no. 1 (2002), 9. 19. Student feedback for the course Youth and Society, 2010. 20. Sarah Baker and Shane Homan, “Rap, Recidivism and the Creative Self: A Popular Music Program for Young Offenders in Detention,” Journal of Youth Studies 10, no. 4 (2007), 459-476. 21. Brady Robards and Andy Bennett, “MyTribe: Manifestations of Belonging on Social Network Sites,” Sociology 45, no. 2 (2011), 303-317.
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POPULAR CULTURE AND THE YOUTH STUDIES CLASSROOM
22. Paul Ramsden, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge Falmer, 2003). 23. Alf Lizzio and Keithia Wilson, “Strengthening Commencing Students’ Sense of Purpose: Integrating Theory and Practice.” Paper presented at First Year in Higher Education Conference, Adelaide, South Australia, June 2010, http:// www.fyhe.com.au/past_papers/papers10/content/pdf/12D.pdf 24. Lee Shulman, “Toward a pedagogy of substance,” AAHE Bulletin, June (1989), 8-13. 25. Palmer, 11.
12